I found an old clipping last week from the Wall Street Journal letters page, sometime in the early 1980s. The writer had saved his high school entrance exam from 1911, taken in rural Indiana, and sent along a sampling.
- In what state and on what waters are the following: Chicago, Duluth, Cleveland, and Buffalo? State an important fact about each.
- Name and locate two countries in the following are important products: wheat, cotton, wool, coffee.
- Write on the Panama Canal, telling who is building it, its location and importance.
- What causes the change from day to night and from winter to summer?
- Name five republics, three limited monarchies, and one absolute monarchy.
- Name the classes of sentences on the basis of meaning or use. On the basis of form.
- Write a sentence with its verb in the active voice; change to passive voice.
- What is meant by inflection? What parts of speech are inflected?
- Write sentences containing nouns showing six case relations.
- Write a model business letter of not more than 40 words.
- What is the length of a rectangular field 80 rods wide that contains 100 acres?
- A wagon is 10 feet long, three feet wide, and 28 inches deep: how many bushels of what will it hold?
- A rope 500 feet long is stretched from the top of a tower and reached the ground 300 feet from the base of the tower: how high is the tower?
- In physiology, name three kinds of joints and give an example of each.
- Give the structure of a muscle and of the spinal cord.
- Define arteries, veins, capillaries, and pulse.
- Write a brief biography of Evangeline.
- What do you think the author of “Enoch Arden” aims to teach us?
- What kind of a man was Shylock?
I couldn’t answer a lot of these now, and I am thrice the age of a potential high school entrant.
What’s interesting about these questions is the amount of local knowledge, civics, economics they cover. Knowing what cities lie on what bodies of water and what crops are grown where requires you to understand the wider world in ways many of us don’t today.
Of course, they also cover a lot of archaic stuff: who know what a rod is or how many bushels will fit in a 35 cubic foot wagon? Just for your edification, a bushel is 2150.42 cubic inches.
And a rod? Go work that one out for yourself.
Suggest some updated versions of these questions in comments, if you like.